The Season 4 preseason for League of Legends is now underway, and the first major patch containing gameplay tweaks is upon us. So what can you expect when you log on? Major changes for Support players and Junglers. Riot provides a full rundown in the video below:

I love, love, love the addition of Trinkets. It should greatly alleviate the need for Supports alone to spend a huge chunk of their gold on sight wards and vision-centric items. And I’m very interested in seeing how rejiggered Support scaling impacts end-game play.

Now that Season 3 is wrapping up, the team at Riot Games is singing the David Bowie classic as it prepares to once again transform its massive MOBA, League of Legends, for Season 4.

So what’s on the change docket this year? In a post on the official LoL Blog, Ryan “Morello” Scott provided a sneak peak, sharing the core concepts we can expect to test out in the upcoming preseason:

Introduce more gameplay and strategy when it comes to map vision and wards

Ensure all roles and positions can experience power-growth and progression in ways that promote skill

Improve game pacing and reduce team snowballing

In terms of the overall competitive gameplay experience, it appears wards and warding will receive the biggest tweaks. Riot says it plans to test out a new item slot specifically for vision items, set per-player ward limits, and make warding a more strategic part of LoL matches. Personally, I hope this means it will open up warding to more positions. Support, the go-to warder, is almost always cash-strapped and winds up spending most of their gold on wards and vision items. It’s one of the reasons so few people actually want to play support.

As per usual, a new season also means a new jungle as well as some new runes and masteries. Riot says it wants to open up the LoL jungle to more characters, and will do so with new items, better rewards for clearing camps, and an all-new fourth monster camp.

Morello also noted Riot wants to heavily adjust how supports earn gold (finally), putting more coin in the pockets of the summoners who play the position hardly anyone ever wants.

No word yet on when the preseason will begin, but it sounds like Riot will start rolling things out in roughly two weeks.

Personally, I can’t wait. The preseason wreaks havoc on the League of Legends meta game, and that’s something that’s always good in my book.

]]>http://www.gamefront.com/riot-outlines-league-of-legends-season-4-changes/feed/0Get Together With a League of Legends Viewing Partyhttp://www.gamefront.com/get-together-with-the-league-of-legends-viewing-party/
http://www.gamefront.com/get-together-with-the-league-of-legends-viewing-party/#commentsThu, 19 Sep 2013 13:46:20 +0000Mike Sharkeyhttp://www.gamefront.com/?p=241120

The League of Legends Season Three World Championship is in full swing, with 14 teams from all corners of the Earth competing for a hefty $2 million prize pool. We’re entering the fourth day of Summoner fighting, and I’d like to use this opportunity to point out that Guo Junliang of Chinese Team OMG has a 20.7/1 kill-death ratio after three matches. That’s obscene. So much so that I’m planning to watch his next match. Heck, I might even use Riot’s just announced Viewing Party Program and find a local spot to watch it live with a few other LOL fans.

It’s pretty simple. If you’ve got an LOL event planned or if you want to find a place to watch an event with others, check out the League of Legends Viewing Party Program. The LOL World Championship finals aren’t until October 4 (at the sold-out Staples Center, no less), and I’ve got a feeling there will be many more pins popping up on the Viewing Party map by then. Come on Boston gamers, let’s see a little East Coast love.

If Boston remains Viewing Party free, there’s always good ol’ solo viewing. You can watch each and every World Championship match (live or recorded) through the official League of Legends Esports page. And if you want to see Junliang dominate before his next match, watch his 11-2-12 killing spree from day one of the championships below:

If it wasn’t for the mute button, I would have given up playing League of Legends long, long ago. The fun, competitive, and infamously toxic MOBA really sucks when you’ve got to play with ragers. That’s something developer Riot is well aware of, and now it’s making its case for playing, you know, like a decent human being. In a new video, Riot throws a boatload of stats at us to prove that ragers aren’t just jerks, they decrease their own as well as the entire team’s chance at victory.

The core stat: An average team without raging wins 54% of its matches, Riot claims, while a team with people more interested in typing insults than actually playing wins just 46% of the time. Support and help your teammates, even when they’re playing poorly, and you’ll increase your chances at victory, Riot says.

Personally, I think Riot is skewing the stats juuust a bit. When a team is winning there are rarely ragers. It’s when the losing starts, and a victory is already neigh impossible, that the raging really begins. So which comes first: the losing or the raging?

Either way, there’s no skewing this stat: 100% of the ragers in LOL make playing the MOBA painful.